Brief History of Work

I made my first website in June 2000 and made several others in the years up to 2004. With the exception of one that was powered by MediaWiki they were all HTML and Flash based. Two of these sites became popular in their niche; attracting up to 1,000 hits a day. In early 2005 I made my first site heavily utilising PHP and MySQL for an American-based publisher. The site was built on top of The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding. The site utilised the PayPal payment gateway. It was while making this site that I first encountered SEO.

In November 2005, I got a job at a local networking company as a web designer/developer. I developed several sites there – including eCommerce - using PHP, Flash and MySQL. During this time I also started my first experiments with link building. In July 2006, I left the company and set up a web design company with a partner, which became known as Mutiny Design. I was the sole designer/developer to start with, but within a few months we brought in an experienced programmer from one of Poland's most reputable web agencies. Although, with his arrival I receded more into a design and HTML/CSS role, I learnt a great deal about programming from him and within a few months was writing complex PHP scripts for both web development and SEO purposes. Early in 2007, we brought in a designer, which pushed me back into programming. Starting in 2007, the company became involved in SEO.

Mutiny Design became the best ranking web design company on search engines in the UK in around July 2007. From this point onwards the amount of work increased with around five enquiries coming in a day. The complexity of the work also increased as we were able to cherry pick more lucrative contacts. I spent most of the latter part of 2007 working on eCommerce sites and a large property portal. Due to strong written English skills it was my responsibility to compose tender documents, reports, briefs etc. which helped us to win our first major contract.

In August 2007, the company received financial investment and due to this my role in the company changed to working on internal projects and the largest external projects. My job was to formulate in-depth strategy for these projects, function as the sole developer as well as promote them online – with a focus on natural search engine rankings. I had completed two of these projects by April 2008 – an eCommerce store and a service based website and had largely completed another service based website. I left the company on 16 April 2008.

During my time at Mutiny, there were two areas which I focused on:

I worked to build a PHP web development framework, which would allows us to produce higher quality, more extensible sites in less time. The main focus of this was to build a MVC using XML and XSL. We also experimented with classes that would handle common components such as forms and retrieving & processing data, which would be configured by structured XML files; thus eliminating much of the repetition involved in web development. The system utilised a relatively complex SQL query generator and processed the result based on XML definitions. This meant that sites could be built with not much more than extensible XML configuration files. I've since more or less completed the core of this, creating a robust HTTP controller (with a focus on low execution time) that loads relevant handling methods based on the nature of the HTTP request, e.g. HTML, XML, AJAX, text etc.

Since mid-2007 I have programmed scores of SEO related scripts, which are generally run from the command line. From this extensive work I have intimate knowledge of: the cURL library, HTTP headers, character encoding, URI encoding, multi-threading as well as in-depth understanding of SEO.

Since leaving Mutiny, I have mainly been involved in coding scripts, back-end control facilities, freelance link building, managing Linux web servers and a little bit of SEO consulting. I've also dabbled in a few other programming languages in search of a successor to PHP due to its poor OO model.